Final animation

After Kiel brought us the environment for the third part of the animation, I set up the lightings for the scene and Mike animated the camera and rendered the whole scene.
The final animation is less than two minutes long so this is exactly what we wanted to achieve.
Generally I’m quite happy with the final animation. Of course there are many things I would like to change or add, like some effects ( fire, smoke for instance) instead of textures. Besides, I would work a little bit longer on piston animation. To rotate the piston I have used ‘linkedXform’ modiffier. At the beginning it worked well but later we started changing positions of the engine elements (including the piston) so when it goes up it shrinks and when it goes down it stretches. Another thing I think it is important to mention about is the planning. At he beginning we wanted show the piston work from a profile not from the front view. It is important because I could design the lower part of the engine with more details inside.
The first 4-5 weeks were very good and enjoyable because we were the first group that had finished the modelling and started the animation. Then we had the some really basic problems with animation and we also changed the ideas for the animation. As result, we got stuck for a while. (One more thing. We had some problems with 3ds max. In many cases it did not operated the way we had expected. Those problems were solved out personally, on our private computers.)
Just to come back to animation I think it would be nice to put some arrows to indicate which part of the presentation is now discussed.
What I like in the animation? I think the overall animation is quite good. The slow- down and speed-up sections made by Mike work very nice as well as the wire frame effect (the opening shot) looks good. I am really happy that the animation is no longer than 2 minutes, that was something we all kept an eye on. Also we did not want to overload people with the information.Here is the final animation of our group project